On 6/29/2010 at 05:31 PM, in message <201006291401.35013.aj@novell.com>, Andreas Jaeger
wrote: On Monday 28 June 2010 17:55:50 Sankar P wrote: [...] So, in short, my 2 cents: If we want more student participation from India, we definitely cannot come up with a solution on a mailing list discussion(1). We may have to sit on a FOSS conference stall with limited number of stakeholders, and devise some plans and execute them. May be come over for FOSS.in or in OSC10 (if someone from India comes) or GNOME Asia summit or some such event and we can plan a solution for this. We discussing in mailing list in my opinion will just cause long threads and no results. Novell has sponsored some FOSS events but this needs to be planned quite some time ahead. We have only a limited budget, so the question is which events to sponsor and how. We should not randomly sponsor events but define a plan on
which regions we want to grow the community first and how.
Even without sponsoring a lot of is possible as the German Linuxtag showed where we had no sponsoring, a free booth, banners and a great program. I've never been to India so don't know how e.g. FOSS.in looks like but hope that similar stuff works as well.
From feedback of conference participants, I hear that sponsorship is not really something that makes an effect - what makes an effect are presentations, tutorials and conversations, e.g. at a booth.
So, let's not say, we need sponsorship money to this or that - let's discuss what we can do with what we have to do.
I'm with Gnokii that Launch events can be very easy to do so wonder why so few do them,
Novell used to sponsor FOSS.in, during the early editions. Later this changed. I will contact you off-list to see if we can plan and work better, in the upcoming years. I was having some discussions about this to Zonker as well. I agree that presentations, tutorials etc. make more impact. But there are some other factors that affect such participation. Most of these are cultural issues which are difficult to understand for a foreigner. Nuremberg employees travelling to Linuxtag is not the same as, say Shayon Mukherjee travelling from his place to Bangalore. India is a much bigger country geographically and we dont have the excellent European railway system. Even then, last year there was an openSUSE-edu booth in FOSS.in. There are some activities done in bits and piece like this, but not at a bigger scale to gain enough critical mass. If you see the profile pages of ambassadors, most of them are "Students" and all of them are from different states (places). There are not more than 2-3 people per state. It is close to impossible for all these 30 people to gather and very expensive even for 2-3 of these to meet across neighboring states. A student travelling to attend a release-party will be considered a luxurios-waste-of-money in most places of India (even by his/her parents, professors etc.) Also, among the 30 or so ambassadors, if you count the official members (ones with @opensuse.org etc., packagers etc.) I believe it will be a lesser number. Germany has far higher number of openSUSE members, even though there may not be much ambassadors (on a relative scale) There are a lot of other issues as well (type of job market, piracy etc.). So to conclude the thread, as I said earlier, we cannot come with a strategy to increase openSUSE release-parties-count/participation from India, on a mailing list discussion. We can have a chat about it over lunch table, sometime. Also, I use this opportunity to Welcome you to India ;-) Sankar -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org